Four Kinds of Happiness & Four Kinds of Friendship | Prof. Christopher Kaczor

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2022

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given on May 11, 2022 at the University of Oregon. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Dr. Christopher Kaczor (rhymes with razor) is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University and a member of the James Madison Society of Princeton University. In 2015, he was appointed to the Pontifical Academy for Life of Vatican City, and he serves as a Consultor to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. He graduated from the Honors Program of Boston College and earned a Ph.D. four years later from the University of Notre Dame. A Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Kaczor is a former Federal Chancellor Fellow at the University of Cologne and William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He is an award winning author of twelve books including The Gospel of Happiness, The Seven Big Myths about Marriage, A Defense of Dignity, The Seven Big Myths about the Catholic Church, The Ethics of Abortion, O Rare Ralph McInerny: Stories and Reflections on a Legendary Notre Dame Professor, Thomas Aquinas on the Cardinal Virtues; Life Issues, Medical Choices; Thomas Aquinas on Faith, Hope, and Love; The Edge of Life, and Proportionalism and the Natural Law Tradition. Dr. Kaczor’s views have been in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, National Review, NPR, BBC, EWTN, ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, MSNBC, TEDx, and The Today Show.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:03.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamisticinstitute.org.
0:10.7	But today, I want to talk to you about it as a fantastic topic, and it's a topic of happiness and friendship.
0:17.7	And I'm going to use as a kind of schema for my remarks the insights drawn from
0:23.8	Robert Spitzer's terrific book called Healing the Culture. If you haven't read his book, I really do
0:29.2	suggest it because I'm going to draw a lot in the book and add some of my own insights.
0:33.3	And what Spitzer points out in his book is that there are really different kinds of people
0:39.5	who seek happiness in different sorts of ways. And he categorizes them in four general
0:45.2	kinds of people. So first, we'll talk about the hedonist. So if you're a hedonist, you see
0:52.1	happiness and you see happiness through bodily pleasure,
0:56.2	and you think the best life is to have as much bodily pleasure as possible.
1:00.1	So you might do this through drinking alcohol or taking drugs or having sex or eating lots of good food
1:05.4	or lying in the sun like a pig, but you think that this is going to be the best life for you.
1:12.8	Secondly, we could talk about a second level of happiness, call this person the egoist. And the egoist seeks happiness,
1:19.9	seeks meaning in life through being better than others in some sort of competition. So I know that the
1:25.8	University of Oregon, this is a huge track place. So maybe you're a great at track. And say, say, I'm going to find my happiness through being the best, you know, miler at University of Oregon or the best miler in the Pact 12 or something. And that's how you'd find your happiness. Or maybe if you're in business, you might say, I had to find my happiness through landing a job at, what's a great financial place, Goldman Sachs or something. I'm going to
1:50.9	get my job there. And then I'm going to be really happy. If you're an actor, maybe you are going to be
1:55.3	in a big movie. But the basic idea is that you find your happiness through being better than others in some respect.
2:03.0	Level three people for Spitzer are people that find their happiness through serving others,
2:08.5	through helping others.
2:09.9	And they find their meaning and their joy in life through this sort of service.
2:14.9	We can call this the altruist.
	...

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